


Twenty-Five Years

by Nievla



Category: Pulleyverse, The Lost Future of Pepperharrow - Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street - Natasha Pulley
Genre: Angst, M/M, Massive spoilers for The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, Pining, Spoilers, Timey-Wimey, cw: abuse, cw: panic attack
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-11
Updated: 2021-03-11
Packaged: 2021-03-18 05:42:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29978235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nievla/pseuds/Nievla
Summary: The first time Mori remembers Thaniel, and the moment he understands the distance that separates them.
Relationships: Keita Mori/Thaniel Steepleton
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7





	Twenty-Five Years

I am lying utterly alone on the nightingale floor, drowning in the song of the cicadas, the moment I meet the love of my life.

I hadn’t been expecting it. It comes, as memories often do, red onto my eyelids like a beam of sunlight.

I open my eyes, and I see him. _Him_. All of him, all at once. I can’t understand it, not in that moment, because I am seeing years and years at the same time, bigger than any memory I’ve had before, the threads packed and wound like a spool of soft red wool. I turn it over, bright and warm and painful in my chest, a feeling I can’t quite place, and try to find an end of thread I can latch onto, tease the memories apart one by one.

I turn my cheek onto the hot wood in blind frustration, forgetting for a moment that it is bruised where Takahiro struck me. I wince at the jolt of pain, bite my knuckle. My scalp stings, too, where he picked me up and dragged me. But _his_ hair will be soft, I think suddenly. The colour, in the strange way of Englishmen, of dried grass, of sun-bleached wood. It is silk, so gentle in my fingers I can already feel it, until I raise my hands and realise there is nothing between them but the choking, still air.

That’s when I remember his name. It catches against me like a knot in the wool, and I undo it with my lips.

_Thaniel._

The shape of it is strange and foreign on my tongue, but I will say it more times than I can count. I will say it softly. I will say it loud. I will say it – I blush – against the skin of his throat, of his ribs, of his thighs. I will say it as he pours me tea – green tea – and his name will take its own ghostly shape in the rising steam, the sighing breath of the _Tha_ , the full-lipped lick of the _niel_.

And he will say mine. Say it hot into my mouth, against my palm, my chin, so quietly I think he does it only because he thinks I cannot hear him.

_Kei._

No one has called me that before.

And then I am forgetting, tumbling. A bomb. A bomb in a _pub_. The word comes to me in a language I can’t place, that I am all at once thinking in without recognising it, until I think of Merrick and know it to be English. English, of course. London. London and its coal, its fog. The cold, crawling fog. 

And _he_ is dead.

I don't see him. They take the bodies out in bags. All I do stand here, knowing I have run but not why. I am filled with that familiar, sickening feeling, like having fallen in a dream. It is the feeling of forgetting. I have lost something, something I know is important. Why was I here? To stop the bomb? To save all these people? And yet there are other, worse bombs. Other people. 

That’s not why I’m here. No. Go back. Turn back the gears, wind back up the spring. _Him_ . Who is he? _Think._ Him. Him. Him.

And it feels like crashing back through water, taking a breath of fresh air. _Thaniel_ . Here is the spool of wool, soft in my hands again, and here is the thread — no, I must go back. _There_ . The bomb. That will kill him. I have to stop it. I flick through the plans like I do a pile of gears – _Will this one work? No, this one — no, not quite, but close — THERE._

It takes flight in my mind like the wings of a storm. The watch. His cold room, the smell of the Thames on the creaking stairs. I will do his washing-up, and the water will scald my hands, but he will tell me one day that he remembers finding the china plates still warm. And then he will stumble into the shop, the dust and glass in his hair, bleeding, and he will ask me something stupid, and I will love him.

Somewhere, across the ocean, are familiar bones. I will go to them.

Now.

I don’t breathe when I sit up. I ache. I want my next breath to be of London, of the terrible cold and smoke, of the warmth of his sweat and his soap and his breath.

It is going to take me over a year, but I see it now, plainly as waking. The green fields. There will be grey eyes, just as I remember them. His soft hair… but it is fairer than I remember. And it is with a horrible drop of my stomach that I realise he is small. Too small. He can’t even walk. He—

I lie dazed for a horrible suspended moment. I am looking at Thaniel, but it is not him. His son? But no, he has no son — And then it is as if the hot summer air freezes.

He is still a child.

I don’t understand at first, because I can still see Thaniel, _my_ Thaniel, Thaniel the man. And there he is, on the bench by the fire, writing something. Music, pen strokes sharp and sweet, their own kind of melody. He looks at me, smiles, and then tries to hide it. And I intend, harder than I have ever intended before, to look in the mirror, that small mirror in that small London house. In the memory, I move. I look at myself, haloed by the rays of a lightbulb.

And I am old.

Panic seizes me, and I bring my hands to my face. Here, in the Yoruji summer, my skin is hot and smooth under my fingertips. I haven’t even started to grow a beard. But there — there my fingers catch on my skin like they would on badly soldered metal. I move them again. Smooth there, now. Seamed here, then. The seams, I realise, are wrinkles.

Lurchingly, I think it has to be a mistake. I must be lost, looking at the wrong place in time. But I glance back at Thaniel’s reflection in the mirror, and there he is, older than I am now, in the prime of his youth, muscled in his waistcoat and sleeves, gold. And there am I, wrinkled paper that has been folded too many times, thin and ragged, and I am unbelievably, unfathomably old.

My breath won’t come. The clock ticks at the speed of treacle. The memories are gone, and all I can think is: _How long? How long?_

It is like plunging my hands into boiling water, but I do it, scrambling for the bits of memory like so many shards of broken china. I catch it again, the one in the mirror. I must be… _Forty_? The entirety of me trembles, and I drop the memory too quickly. But another one catches my hand, almost by accident. A newspaper about the bombings. There, the print in thin cramped English. Here, the title. The date.

_1884_

I think, if I could breathe, I would scream. But the air won’t come, something heavy pressing down on my chest. In a startled flurry I think it must be Takahiro holding me down, and my eyes fly open. But there is nothing there. Nothing, I suppose, but the weight of the years between _this_ , me and the cicadas and the floor chirping as I try to gnaw back my tears; and _that_ , grey London and his arms holding me and his lips and his laugh making everything bright. Outside, by the old stone wall, a bird shrieks. 

I look at the clock. It’s the first I’ve made, but I remember all the others I’ll make, stretching ahead of me in shades of winking filigree and gold, ticking, ticking, ticking, ticking. My heart pulses against the eyelids, the temples, the throat that he will one day kiss, and it seems to me there are a hundred beats of my heart for each click of the clock. _Thaniel._ The hand crawls along, ten seconds, fifteen, and it is already too long. _Thaniel._ And I think, with a despair I’ve never known before, about how many times it has yet to go round the clock, round and round, until it finally ticks that one last second, just like all the ones before, when he will stumble into my shop, and I will see him. 

_Thaniel_.

**Author's Note:**

> Dedicated to the Discord fam <3.
> 
> Notes on characters' ages: My theory is that Mori only started "remembering" Thaniel when Thaniel was *ahem* conceived, because before that the possibility of him existing would've been too slim. I understood from the books that there's about a 20 year age gap between them, so I initially wrote this thinking Mori was around 20... until I was informed that he's actually only 14 years older than Thaniel. So yes, technically Mori would be 13 or 14 here, and is remembering his future relationship with a 25-year-old... hence why it's tagged as underage, just to be on the safe side.


End file.
